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Fame is but an inscription on a grave, and glory the melancholy blazon on a coffin lid.

Alexander Smith

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Alexander Smith
Age: 36 †
Born: 1830
Born: December 31
Died: 1867
Died: January 5
Poet
Cille Mheàrnaig
Melancholy
Grave
Graves
Reputation
Fame
Inscription
Glory
Inscriptions
Coffin
Coffins

More quotes by Alexander Smith

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Nature never quite goes along with us. She is somber at weddings, sunny at funerals, and she frowns on ninety-nine out of a hundred picnics.
Alexander Smith
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A man can bear a world's contempt when he has that within which says he's worthy. When he contemns himself, there burns the hell.
Alexander Smith
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God has thickly strewn infinity with grandeur.
Alexander Smith
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It is a characteristic of pleasure that we can never recognize it to be pleasure till after it is gone.
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Eternity doth wear upon her face the veil of time. They only see the veil, and thus they know not what they stand so near!
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We bury love Forgetfulness grows over it like grass: That is a thing to weep for, not the dead.
Alexander Smith
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The spot of ground on which a man has stood is forever interesting to him.
Alexander Smith
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In the entire circle of the year there are no days so delightful as those of a fine October, when the trees are bare to the mild heavens, and the red leaves bestrew the road, and you can feel the breath of winter, morning and evening - no days so calm, so tenderly solemn, and with such a reverent meekness in the air.
Alexander Smith
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The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has you may survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the savants in the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality.
Alexander Smith
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It is the sternest philosophy, but on the whole the truest, that, in the wide arena of the world, failure and success are not accidents, as we so frequently suppose, but the strictest justice.
Alexander Smith
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Sweet April's tears, Dead on the hem of May.
Alexander Smith
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Pleasure has no logic it never treads in its own footsteps.
Alexander Smith
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A man's real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.
Alexander Smith
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I have learned to prize the quiet, lightning deed, not the applauding thunder at its heels that men call fame.
Alexander Smith
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In winter, when the dismal rain Comes down in slanting lines, And Wind, that grand old harper, smote His thunder-harp of pines.
Alexander Smith
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Death is the ugly fact which Nature has to hide, and she hides it well.
Alexander Smith
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An old novel has a history of its own.
Alexander Smith
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I go into my library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morning air of the world while the scent of Eden's roses yet lingered in it, while it vibrated only to the world's first brood of nightingales, and to the laugh of Eve. I see the pyramids building I hear the shoutings of the armies of Alexander.
Alexander Smith
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To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.
Alexander Smith
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A man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.
Alexander Smith